It really does. Starting anything sucks. Even worse? Starting something over, especially if it was something that at one point in time you were fairly successful with. Education, a new diet, cleaning a room you cleaned two days before but is magically destroyed again by the unknown forces of destruction that cohabit with you, and my personal (least) favorite; starting to work out again.

I am an adult woman of a spry twenty-eight years old, four years ago my husband and I moved to a place called Twenty-Nine Palms situated conveniently nearly two hours from the nearest Target, and at least forty minutes from the nearest Walmart, were the average summer temperatures can melt your car tires into asphalt if you are cautious of where you park. I had no friends when we moved there, a two year old, and began therapy for the first time in my life. I was quickly diagnosed with a panic disorder, agoraphobia and this awesome little thing called ADD. My doctor controversially started my on adderall as an adult and it changed my entire life. Suddenly I could get off the couch, I wasn’t depressed eating non-stop and I started something I never expected. I started running, in the high desert. The altitude is one of the hardest ones to run in, it was often impossibly warm even at night when I ran, and my running path was full of hills that I am fairly certain only went upward no matter which way you took them.

There I started using a paid app called Zombies! Run 5k, which was a precursor to running with the main app Zombies! Run. It was fun and engaging and I managed through shin splints, and bad shoes to complete the program. After my first solid three miles of running I was on top of the world.

And then I quit.

I don’t know why I quit, I assume it was because we were in the middle of moving to another state in the middle of Christmas time, stopping for a few weeks in Kansas to visit family and ending up breaking down in a strange state and having to buy a new car for the first time in our lives. Essentially things lapsed. When we arrived in our new home in Jacksonville, NC I struggled to get back into fitness in general and for some reason, unbeknownst to me, I never sought out a therapist until I hit a very serious mental low, something I am sure I will discuss at a later time.

I spent years off of adderall because of this mental low point and being sure that it would only increase my mental issues. As it turns out, adderall has been essential to managing my anxiety. Without it I lay around and can’t make my brain focus on anything long enough to complete a single activity. So now, after the birth of my second child, recently back on my medication I look around and see that the body I struggled so hard for in that high desert, running which I could see rattlesnakes and coyotes, sweating through massive elevations just because I felt strong and empowered has slipped away because I didn’t take care of my mind and my body.

So here I am, four years older, with a, nearly, six year old and a baby. Finally consistently struggling to begin something I started four years ago.

Every time I work out I feel the shake in muscles that once felt so solid and strong, and they are so weak and loose now. I try every time I finish a workout to remember that this is a process, and even if the process happened faster when I was younger, it is still one I can participate in.

So here we are, starting over sucks. It’s a rough, sometimes painful, and usually ugly, red-faced mess, but one day it won’t suck quite so hard!